Related papers: Mirror instability in the turbulent solar wind
Statistical analysis of Faraday Rotation Measure (RM) maps of the intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters provides a unique tool to evaluate some spatial features of the magnetic fields there. Its combination with numerical simulations…
Nonthermal features are ubiquitously observed in electron velocity distribution functions in the solar wind, yet their origin in the collisionless, turbulent, expanding solar-wind plasma remains unclear. We investigate how solar-wind…
In weakly collisional astrophysical plasmas, such as the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters, the amplification of cosmic magnetic fields by chaotic fluid motions is hampered by the adiabatic production of magnetic-field-aligned pressure…
Cluster plasmas are magnetised already at very low magnetic field strength. Low collisionality implies that conservation of the first adiabatic invariant results in an anisotropic viscous stress (Braginskii viscosity) or, equivalently,…
Particle velocity distributions measured in the weakly collisional solar wind are frequently found to be non-Maxwellian, but how these non-Maxwellian distributions impact the physics of plasma turbulence in the solar wind remains…
We study magnetothermal instability in the ionized plasmas including the effects of Ohmic, ambipolar and Hall diffusion. Magnetic field in the single fluid approximation does not allow transverse thermal condensations, however, non-ideal…
We use the mean-field dynamo equations to show that an incoherent alpha effect in mirror-symmetric turbulence in a shearing flow can generate a large scale, coherent magnetic field. We illustrate this effect with simulations of a few simple…
The intracluster medium (ICM) is the low-density diffuse magnetized plasma in galaxy clusters, which reaches virial temperatures of up to 10^8 K. Under these conditions, the plasma is weakly collisional and therefore has an anisotropic…
It is shown that low-collisionality plasmas cannot support linearly polarized shear-Alfv\'en fluctuations above a critical amplitude $\delta B_{\perp}/B_{0} \sim \beta^{\,-1/2}$, where $\beta$ is the ratio of thermal to magnetic pressure.…
We investigate the transition of the solar wind turbulent cascade from MHD to sub-ion range by means of a detail comparison between in situ observations and hybrid numerical simulations. In particular we focus on the properties of the…
The nature of MHD turbulence is analyzed through both temporal and spatial magnetic fluctuation spectra. A magnetically turbulent plasma is produced in the MHD wind-tunnel configuration of the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment (SSX). The…
In weakly collisional extragalactic plasmas such as the intracluster medium, viscous stress and the rate of change of the magnetic-field strength are proportional to the local pressure anisotropy, so subject to constraints imposed by the…
Plasma flow and acceleration in a magnetic mirror configuration are studied using a drift-kinetic particles-in-cell model in the paraxial approximation, with an emphasis on finite temperature effects and energy transport. Energy conversion…
The expansion of a thermal pressure-driven radial blast shell into a dilute ambient plasma is examined with two-dimensional PIC simulations. The purpose is to determine if laminar shocks form in a collisionless plasma that resemble their…
Kinetic plasma processes have been investigated in the framework of solar wind turbulence, employing Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell (HVM) simulations. The dependency of proton temperature anisotropy T_{\perp}/T_{\parallel} on the parallel plasma…
Turbulence with a large magnetic Reyonolds number, generically leads to rapidly growing magnetic noise over and above any mean field. We revisit the dynamics of this fluctuating field, in homogeneous, isotropic, helical turbulence. Assuming…
In the absence of efficient collisions, deviations from thermal equilibrium of plasma particle distributions are controlled by the self-generated instabilities. The whistler instability is a notorious example, usually responsible for the…
Powerful lasers may in future produce magnetic fields that would allow us to study turbulent magnetohydrodynamic inverse cascade behavior. This has so far only been seen in numerical simulations. In the laboratory, however, the produced…
The solar wind and the interstellar medium are permeated by large-scale magnetic fields that render magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence anisotropic. In the weak-turbulence limit in which three-wave interactions dominate, analytical and…
We study an axion soliton, which weakly interacts with background matter and magnetic fields. A mirror-symmetric soliton, for which the magnetic flow is due to secondary magnetic helicity invariant, is described by the Iroshnikov-Kreichnan…